restaurant

Something amiss at City Fish

The Oldsmar restaurant does the big things right - think wonderfully prepared salmon and lamb - but misses on too many details.

By Laura Reiley, Times food critic
Published May 16, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Douglas R. Clifford] The decor at City Fish is an unusual mishmash that is more puzzling than charming. Exposed ductwork with an island flair?

Judging a book by its cover may be frowned upon, but judging a restaurant by its menu seems perfectly fair.

In the case of City Fish Seafood Grill and Chop House, the menu says quite a bit: It's large and imposing, with a distressed copper cover that certainly didn't come cheap. Then the text inside is riddled with spelling errors. And there are inaccuracies: A flatbread advertised with smoked salmon and cream cheese arrives topped instead with sour cream and Parmesan; a bacon-wrapped shrimp "stuffed with pineapple" comes with the pineapple AWOL.

Little things, really, but they signal an inattention to detail that carried through the whole dining experience on more than one visit. There's potential here, but it needs a great deal of polish.

Opened in September 2006, it's a sprawling chophouse with an industrial warehouse-meets-Caribbean islands motif - exposed ductwork alongside a tiki hut bar. Strange.

The glass-fronted refrigerated case at the entrance, meant to showcase the mouth-watering steaks, chops and fillets of fresh fish, is sparse, and stuff looks tired. To get people "oohing" and "ahhing" over a pile of raw meat, it's got to be sumptuous.

Service is one of the real stumbling blocks at City Fish.

No one mans the phone at the front. You can't call for directions, to tell a party you're running late or even to report you've left your sunglasses behind.

Table service is similarly quirky.

One night we waited, and waited, for a server to appear. No apology or explanation for the lengthy delay, followed by a couple of cardinal serving sins: items on our bill that we didn't order again, no apology and a tactic that went like this:

"What's the side vegetable?"

"A zucchini medley with Parmesan."

"Hmm, I don't want that."

"You could have asparagus instead."

What she didn't mention was that the asparagus (about eight skinny stalks) cost an additional $4.50.

Not cool.

Wine gets served with an empty glass and those single-serving glass carafes - nice, but since the servers don't use bar trays to bring drinks, the carafes and/or empty glasses get tucked into armpits or clutched precariously.

That shrimp dish with the missing pineapple ($7.90) was strangely conceived, with a heavy mantle of crisp bacon enfolding slightly undercooked, translucent shrimp, topped with toasted coconut and served with a pale green mango-flavored sauce.

And the salmon flatbread ($8.50) mentioned above is one of a half-dozen ultra-thin flatbread offerings. It's not exactly a pizza, more like a super fragile cracker that doesn't hold up to some of the robust toppings. There's lots of breakage twixt plate and lips.

Not all is lost at City Fish: A cedar-planked salmon ($18.90) was a perfectly cooked, ultra-smoky wild Atlantic salmon fillet, served atop the charred length of wood and accompanied by the veggie medley and mashed potatoes or simple rice.

The rack of lamb ($23.90) is equally well-prepared, six rosy chops napped with a credible demiglace-style sauce and paired with the same sides and a stack of perfunctory onion rings.

Bimini grouper ($21.90) married nice flavors of grouper, scallop, shrimp and crab, but the plate's monochromatic beige color (the fish, its white wine-mushroom sauce and the nearby rice) was broken up only by a little pouf of undressed mesclun mix.

With dessert, servers can redeem themselves with a tableside service of bananas Foster ($8.90) - the buttery, brown sugary, boozy bananas flambeed with grace and ladled around crepe-wrapped vanilla ice cream.

Still, a little sweetness doesn't entirely undo the bad taste left by some of City Fish's other decisions.

Laura Reiley dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays all expenses. A restaurant's advertising has nothing to do with selection for review or the assessment. Reiley can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.

Review

City Fish Seafood Grill and Chop House

4022 Tampa Road, Oldsmar

(813) 814-5800

Cuisine: Steaks and seafood

Hours: 4-10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 4-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Details: American Express, Visa, MasterCard; reservations for parties of 10 or more weeknights, of 20 or more weekends; full bar

Prices: Dinner entrees $14.90-$36

[Last modified May 16, 2007, 12:51:55]